


Surrender

by objectlesson



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon, Recovery, Romance, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 06:17:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5573983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn is not used to holding things which aren’t blasters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surrender

**Author's Note:**

> Oops! I never thought this would happen, as only a luke(hur hue)-warm Star Wars fan and Star Trek loyalist. But here I am. They're just too cute. I haven't read any fic for this fandom yet, but I suspect this story is probably a messy pile of trope garbage. Sorry about that. Enjoy!

Finn wakes up under the gleam of florescence, breath stuck in a dry throat, back aching and itching like some deep wound half-healed. A disjointed jumble of memories and images surface in his brain as he blinks. Snow. The smell of seared flesh, like rancor meat roasting on a spit. Rey’s face illuminated in fierce red light. More snow. Splintering wood. A terrible, blinding pain. 

Panic rears in Finn’s chest. _Rey, where is she, did they take her?_ Then, _where did they take_ me? He struggles to make figures out in the searing too-brightness, sick with fear and certain, _certain_ the First Order caught back up with him and strapped him down to this table, sure this is the end of his short-lived foray with the resistance, with freedom, as Finn, a real boy with a real name. He grits his teeth, and through the haze of confusion, he hears someone say, “Hey. Buddy, hey, hey. You gotta lie back down, kid. Take it easy. You’re gonna be ok.” 

Air huffs out of Finn’s burning lungs at the sound of his name, and finally, a head of fly-away dark hair materializes in front of him, eyes beneath brows knit in concern, broad shoulders in rebel-orange. He coughs, and Poe Dameron offers him water. “Drink. You’ve been out awhile, can’t feel good on the throat.” 

Finn sucks desperately through a straw and feels little bit more whole, a bit more like a person. He coughs and coughs, and Poe gently pushes him back to the bed as he tries to sit up. “Rey,” Finn manages to wheeze out. 

“Safe,” Poe tells him. “She’s finding Skywalker. It’s gonna be ok.” 

Finn sinks back into the bed, swallowing thickly, insides a mess of relief, loss, exhaustion. “And me?” he says hoarsely, more to himself than Poe, as if Poe knows the ever-raging battle of fight or flight pulled taut and bloody inside him, as if Poe can possibly tell him what he’s supposed to do now, where he belongs. 

“She told me to look after you,” Poe says, like it’s simple. “We need all the First Order intel we can get, and plus, BB-8 thinks you’re family already. So. Don’t worry about any of it. You don’t have to run, you can stay here.” His hand is still on Finn’s chest, fingers spread, palm wide and warm. Finn’s heart beats beneath the weight of it, and perhaps nothing else has felt so good, so _surprising_ , in the whole of his life. 

\---

The wound upon Finn’s back heals into a wide, raised scar, shining and scalloped and dark like a bruise in rotten fruit. Sometimes he cranes his neck to examine it in the polished chrome rubble in his quarters on the base, reflection distorted around this great strip of damaged skin bisecting the valley between his scapulae. It’s something he could almost forget about if it didn’t still itch occasionally, didn’t still ache and crawl when he’s falling asleep, a dull pain which brings along with it memories of snow, of screams, of burning light.   
“Don’t forget about it,” Poe tells him, palming the scar through Finn’s shirt one afternoon they’re sitting side by side sharing lunch. Finn heats up under the touch, always longing for more, more contact, more affirmation, more evidence that he is human, that he hasn’t fused with the Storm Trooper mask he once wore. “Scars are great, scars make us who we are,” Poe says. “Prove who’s a hero, who’s lived through the battle and come out stronger.” His hand slides away from Finn’s back, and it’s absurd, but Finn grieves its loss. Touch is something he cannot get enough of, and he thinks that longing is a very dangerous thing. A vice he must keep in check, as he runs the risk of asking too much, being too much. 

The thing is, Finn doesn’t feel like a hero. It didn’t feel heroic to run from the First Order, it didn’t feel heroic to return to find Rey. Every single choice he has made since shedding his mask and his orders in favor of humanity is selfishly motivated, at its core. He is not a rebel at heart, there is no rebellion in his blood. Just a survival drive, just a wild need to escape pain, fear. He doesn’t think selfishness and heroism can coexist. He tells Poe so. “Nah, man. I’m no hero, not really, not like you. I don’t fight for _ideas_ , freedom or justice or any of that. I just fight because you put a blaster in my hand. I fought to get out, and now I’m fighting to stay out. It’s all for me, in the end.” He chews thoughtfully, a haze of self-deprecation sliding slowly over his heart, confusing him, distorting it all. “Guess that makes me more of a coward,” he adds. 

Poe shrugs, tearing off a corner of his bread ration. “Everyone is in it for themselves, on some level. Everyone lost someone they loved to the Empire, or the First Order, or even the Sith. Everyone’s been hurt by it and it looking for redemption, revenge, closure, their own selfish mission, you know? There’s nothing wrong with that,” he explains through a full mouth. 

Finn raises his eyebrows. “Huh. I thought all you resistance folks were doing this because it’s “the right thing.’” This giant battle between good and evil, right and wrong. That high and mighty mythical stuff.” 

“It _is_ the right thing,” Poe explains. “Just because everyone is in it for their own personal, private, _selfish_ reasons doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing, that’s _why_ it’s right. Because we, collectively, make up the people.” BB-8 beeps something at him in droid, and he laughs, nodding. “He told me to remind you you’re a part of the people, too. You’ve been hurt by the First Order just as much as anyone else here fighting with us has, maybe even more. And you’re fighting too. That makes you a hero, buddy. No way out out of it. Sorry to rob you of your guilt, kid.”

Poe’s smile is very bright and very real, maybe too bright to even look at so Finn casts his gaze to his lap to escape the fierce heat of it. Something wild and elated expands in his solar plexus as he tentatively tries these new identities on. Human. Part of the people. Hero. 

He sits beside Poe Dameron and BB-8, and wonders if it will ever be a comfortable enough fit that he doesn’t feel like he’s lying, masquerading, an outsider leeching heat and brilliance from a fire which will never burn for him. 

\---

Poe fixes his jacket for him. He sews a new strip of fabric into the tear, some thick grey nylon from a recycled cargo bag. “Because you’re a rebel, even if you think you’re not,” Poe tells him, punching his arm and draping the jacket over his head playfully. “And because I like you in my clothes.” 

Finn’s stomach drops hard, straight down out of his body, leaving him fluttering, empty. Poe’s smiling easily at him, hair tousled and dark, hands on his shoulders and Finn feels so stunned and floored and silenced by this whole exchange that he can’t to anything but stumble, shrugging the jacket on sheepishly. “Thanks,” he says, grinning a grin he can’t keep off his face, the wide, painful, cheek-splitting kind.

Poe takes a step back, admiring him, and the silence which stretches between them feels taut, loaded. Finn wants to press on it further, wants to ask Poe what he means; he wants to take the jacket back into his quarters and trace the clumsy new stitching with his fingers and marvel over the fact that someone cares about him enough to give him something like this, not once but twice. 

Slapping him on the shoulder, Poe turns on his heel and walks away, and Finn is left warm and prickling, thinking hard about mended rips, scars which still ache. 

\---

Finn is not used to holding things which aren’t blasters. He keeps dropping tools, a can of sealant sliding clumsily from dull, sweat-slick fingers as he tries to hand it to Poe, who’s on his back beneath his X-Wing, tinkering away on something. 

It rolls away from them and Finn watches it go, groaning. “Oops,” he mumbles, sick of chasing after things he’s messed up. “Are you sure you don’t want a better assistant? It’s only a matter of time before I break something super important and sabotage the whole resistance,” he says, standing and grabbing the now dented can before delivering it directly into Poe’s hand, lest he somehow drop it again if he doesn’t watch the transfer. Their fingers brush, and Poe’s are dark with engine grease, leaving a smudge on Finn’s knuckles. 

“Nah,” He says, popping the can open with a screwdriver. “I don’t need an assistant, just company. No better company than yours.” 

BB-8 protests loudly, rocking back and forth before rolling impatiently against Poe’s boot, saving Finn from having to come up with a witty and or suave response to being told he is the best company in the rebel base. It’s too big to respond to, one of many fleeting things Poe tells him which make him wonder if their intense, possibly parasitic friendship is this way because it was born from trauma, or because of something else. 

He lets most of these things roll off his back, un-interrogated, very nearly ignored. Despite their fast closeness, Finn doesn’t actually _know_ Poe that well, and he certainly hasn’t known him that _long_. On top of that, his own people-reading skills are stunted and damaged from a lifetime of coercive battle training. Friendship is new; Poe is new. Finn is not used to holding things which are not blasters and he’s not used to touching things without consequently shattering them. The balance between him and Poe seems so fragile, so delicate, and he worries that reading too much into the things Poe says to him could easily offset it. He doesn’t want that. 

The truth is that Finn is so hungry for attention and affection of any kind that everything from Poe seems vast and confusing in its splendor. He wants to soak it up like a sponge, he wants to lie in this friendship like a puddle of blood and absorb it all until he can believe with certainty that he’s not alone. 

He knows he’s desperate, he knows he’s starved. It’s his job, then, to not steal what Poe offers and run with it. It’s his job, then, to take it all with grains of salt, doses of skepticism. Just because a guy likes the way he looks in his clothes and thinks he’s the best company on the base, doesn’t mean he’s the end to his loneliness, the answer to the ache in his chest. Finn can’t allow himself to give love so freely, when there is so little in the galaxy left to squabble over. 

\---

They’re on a mission on Bakarr, and Finn is pretty sure he’s freezing to death. “ _Why_ , again, is the rendezvous on a planet made primarily of _ice_?!” He hisses to Poe through chattering teeth. They’re bundled up in some godforsaken cave beneath a sheet-rock face, and Poe is trying in vain to keep a weak fire burning. 

“Just be thankful we weren't around during the Revolution,” Poe tells him, blowing on the flickering embers and grimacing. “There was a base on Hoth at one point, you know.” 

“Crazy people,” Finn mumbles, warming his hands and shivering. “Why didn’t they build a base somewhere _tropical_?” 

Poe laughs, jamming sticks into the fire, feeding the flames as they flicker to life. “I’ll write a letter to General Organa,” he says, “and request next time we get sent to the beach for a mission, how about that?”

“I just hope we survive _this_ mission,” Finn says. He scoots closer to the fire, relieved to see it gaining height, momentum. They’re huddled beneath two Bantha skins, and Finn can’t stop thinking about how much warmer they might be if they were beneath _one_ skin. He imagines Poe’s breath against his own neck, the damp heat of it shivering out onto his pulse, and his stomach flips over. He tells himself he’s gotta stop imagining Poe giving him things he cannot have without destroying, or at least things he wouldn’t know what to do with, even if he did have them. 

“I’ll make sure we survive,” Poe tells him, stoking the fire. 

Moments pass, moments of shivering and Finn’s breath coming out in steaming white plumes from his lips and mingling with Poe’s before it dissipates into nothingness. Eventually Finn grits his teeth and thinks, _fuck it_ , tired and cold and sick and dizzy with want, with loneliness. “You got room under that skin?” 

Poe looks at him with wide, surprised eyes which reflect the fire back at him, flickering and dark. Then, without a word, he shifts to make room for Finn beside him. 

\---

Finn jostles next to Poe, their shoulders brushing in the dry flickering heat as the fire grows, crackling before them. Finn is very focused on all the places they’re touching, the planes of their thighs pressed together, knees bumping, Poe’s hair tickling against Finn’s jaw as he leans past him to escape billows of smoke. There, face pressed into his knuckles as he peers up at Finn, he asks, “Less cold now?” His eyes are strange and searching, like he’s looking past Finn’s skin, straight inside him. 

Finn watches the flames make shadows in the angles of Poe’s face, and swallows thickly. He is less cold, certainly, but he’s still miserable; the ice outside their cave keeps making him remember things he does not want to remember: Rey’s robes caked in frost, a terrible agony ripping down his back, the ache in his arms from inexpertly wielding a lightsaber. On top of that, he’s too close to Poe, too close and not close enough all at once,treading upon dangerous territory he swore he’d avoid. He shakes his head, “Less cold, still...still something.” 

And Poe, who somehow can _tell_ , nods solemnly. “You’re thinking about Rey.” 

“Yeah,” Finn says eventually, a little caught off guard by the candor. “I was.” 

Poe is still nodding, a darkness settling onto his brow, shadows beneath his eyes. “Were you...are you in love with her?” he asks. 

Finn’s heart thunders suddenly, kick-started into motion at this turn in conversation, the way the word _love_ sounds in the timber of Poe’s voice. He’s not certain he can answer this question truthfully; he doesn’t know himself well enough. He thinks of the terrific brightness of Rey’s smile, teeth and eyes flashing, cheeks pink and young and alive. He thinks of the pure, exalted joy of her company, his desperation to be close to her, to save her, to know she is safe. He thinks of love, and how someone like him cannot truly know what it is, not really. Rey’s attention, Poe’s attention. They both feel like love, but everything burns when you’ve just come in from the cold. 

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I love her, for sure. I mean, besides you, she was the first real friend I ever had. The first person who ever cared about me, believed in me. Besides you.” He shuts his mouth and swallows hard, stunned to feel a stinging wetness come to his eyes in admitting this, all that he owes to Poe, the extent of his power over him. Blinking rapidly, Finn rips his gaze away from Poe, who politely gives him space, spreading out beside him onto his back and pillowing his head on his wadded up jacket, taking the bantha skin with him. Finn takes a breath, and makes himself continue. “But I don’t know if I can make that call, say what it means to be _in_ love, or whatever,” he says, shivering now that he’s outside the skin. “The First Order made me into a machine, and machines don’t get to do that. So, I don’t know. She’s doing her thing, figuring out the Force or whatever. I’m glad to know her, be her friend, but I’m gonna say, no. It’s not love, it’s not like that.” 

“Huh,” Poe says quietly. Then, after a moment of heavy silence, “Will you lie down with me? You’re gonna freeze again if you’re not under here, come on.” 

Mechanically, Finn listens, even if part of him is sure this is a bad idea, a slippery slope. He curls up next to Poe, as far away as can be while still staying beneath the skin. Their knees bump together, and so Finn rolls onto his back, staring at the jagged rock ceiling of their cave, wondering what the hell Poe Dameron _wants_ from him, wondering what love is, how it works, if it’s the crazy thrum of terrified joy that’s beating in his chest right now, alongside his heart like its second beat. 

Eventually he says, “Why, do you think I’m in love with Rey?” Like Poe can tell him, like Poe knows all of these messy, human things laid out inside him he doesn’t understand, crossed wires and misfiring signals, like Poe can write a map to his guts so he can navigate through the haze of himself. 

He feels Poe shrug beside him. “I think you’ve got a big crush on her, maybe. I dunno. She’s real cute, and you two have been through a lot together. But hey, I can’t make that call either, about love. Especially not for you.” 

Finn sighs. There are things he’s never told anyone, things which fester and burn inside him, things which still ache as they surface unbidden in his mind. Here, on Bakarr, lying beside Poe Dameron while the storm rages on outside their cave, it just falls out of him. “Back when I was with The First Order, there was someone. TS-378. It wasn’t love, but it was...it was something.” 

“What kind of something?” Poe asks, voice so quiet, so careful. 

Finn shakes his head, not sure. “Dunno. It was unspeakable, obviously that kind of thing was forbidden, way against protocol. So it wasn’t a relationship as much as it was a feeling, a mutual feeling. We did drills together. Bunked together. Whatever it was between him and I was real, even if there wasn’t a name for it, even if it could never be realized,” Finn explains, so many formerly painful, choked-silent truths hitting the air like they’re nothing, assumed by the night. He smiles to himself. “I’ve never told anyone about TS-378.” 

“Thank you for telling me,” Poe says, reaching across the warm, humid divide between their bodies. His fingers nudge up against Finn’s forearm, hot and electric. “Where is he now?” 

Finn shrugs. “He died on our first mission. That was why...or at least _part_ of why I couldn’t do it, couldn’t kill those people. Part of why I came and found you.” 

Finn turns to look at Poe. Poe with his hair still damp from melted snow, strands of it strewn messily across his forehead and before Finn can think too much about it, he reaches out and gently brushes it away from the terrible, shining darkness of Poe’s eyes. 

Poe grabs his wrist tight, a grip so fierce and biting it stops Finn’s breath in his throat, makes his heart pound. Poe drags his hand so that his fingertips collide with his rapid pulse, and then, very suddenly, the wet spread of Poe’s mouth is at his jaw, searing and terrifying, something like a kiss but not quite. Finn locks up, forming a fist, his knuckles scraping against the stubble of Poe’s adam’s apple. Finn is not used to holding things which aren’t blasters. He does not how to grip Poe’s throat without crushing it, but he _wants_ to. He wants to so badly. 

He gasps, and then Poe is kissing him, his lips warm and chapped and better than anything Finn has felt in his entire life. Too good for him, too good entirely, and he is going to break something, ruin it all, so he yanks away, heart a mess of terror and thunder. “Stop,” he wheezes, shaking so hard his teeth rattle together. “I can’t,” he says, even as his body surges forward beyond his control, even as he stares as the shining, swollen seam of Poe’s lips and struggles to not kiss it. 

Poe regards him gravely, curiously, eyes dark and confused. “Hey, hey. I’m sorry. It’s ok. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.” 

Finn laughs nervously, trying not to touch Poe but touching him anyway, mauling up his chest, across his shoulder, into his hair. “It’s not that. You have no idea, _no idea_ how bad I want it,” he breathes. 

“Then what?” Poe asks gently, eyes sliding shut as Finn thumbs his mouth open compulsively, experimentally. He has never touched someone like this. He doesn’t know how to do it, how to make someone feel good, how to keep from tearing into Poe, making him bleed. His hands tremble, but Poe just tilts into his touch, the curve of his cheek fitting neatly into Finn’s palm. 

“I...I don’t know how,” Finn asks. “I’m scared I’ll hurt you, fuck something up-”

“Break something super important and sabotage the whole resistance?” Poe asks, laughing dryly and leaning in close. He brushes his lips against the corner of Finn’s mouth, the line of his cheekbone, the flicker of his pulse just at his temple. “Listen, Finn. You’re not FN anymore, kid. I told you so, and here you are. You’re not going to _hurt_ me, you’re not a killer. You resisted years of First Order brainwashing because you didn’t want to hurt anyone. You’re one of the people, remember. You’re human.”

Finn swallows, wetting his lips with his tongue. “But I don’t know _how,_ ” he tries to explain, drunk on Poe’s breath, their legs twining beyond his control as he pitches forward, dizzy with longing. “I don’t know what to do.” 

Poe looks at him hard, eyes half-lidded and lips parted. “Let me show you,” he pleads. And then, because he is so desperate for intimacy, for friendship that he can’t stop himself, and because Poe feels _so_ fucking perfect against him, Finn lets him. He lets his mouth be kissed to softness, licked apart, lets himself flick his tongue against Poe’s and drown in overwhelming strangeness of it all, the heat sickness, the bliss. Kissing is much more wet than he imagined it, much softer, hotter. He loses himself in it, the blur of hands, of spit, of crushed, muted groans.

It feels good to surrender. _Surrender isn’t the same thing as running away_ , Finn thinks, arching up against Poe’s solidity, the planes of their bodies grinding together in the heat of the fire, sweat-damp and salty and sticky. This doesn’t feel like running. 

\---

At some point, Poe inches his fingers down Finn’s scar and feels it curiously, gently, like he’s touching a still bleeding wound. “Does it hurt?” he prays into Finn’s gasping mouth. 

“Sometimes” Finn admits. Words are coming out of him messily. He’s tingling with overwhelm, chest tight and skin prickled with gooseflesh under the tender-rough insistence of Poe’s hands, it’s all too much, not enough, the best and most terrifying stretch of time in his short life of blood and pain and orders 

“Yeah?” Poe asks, anchoring him. 

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Wakes me up, in the middle of the night, sometimes. Stings when I smell burning meat. Stings when I see snow.” 

“Finn,” Poe murmurs, lips soft around the name he chose for him, and Finn thinks he cannot be more moved by Poe Dameron in this moment, but then Poe rolls him over and kisses down his scar, soft and slow. Like TS-378, it feels like an unspeakable thing. Finn hides his face in his arms, and because he cannot stop himself any longer, sobs silently into the crook of his own elbow, shuddering under Poe’s tender mouth. Poe says nothing, just touches him for a long time, all gentle tracingfinger tips, the scrape of teeth, a slick tongue. 

When they kiss again, Poe’s mouth tastes of salt, of old pain still healing. 

\---

They finish and lie tangled together, shining in a sweat sheen and tangled beneath the bantha skin like a braif of gold and black. It feels very strange, so new, but Finn can’t stop smiling, eyes hidden beneath the careless splay of his own forearm. Poe sits up to tend to the now dying fire, and Finn admires his back, brown skin criss-crossed in marks from his own nails. “This is ok?” He asks, tracing one with his forefinger. 

Poe grins brilliantly over his shoulder at him from beneath a wing of messy hair. “Better than ok.”

Finn hides his eyes again, stomach flipping over. “Geez,” he mumbles. 

Poe flops down next to him again, shivering as he gets close, draping his arm over Finn’s chest. “We look good together,” he mumbles, lips against Finn’s scapula as he admires the lines of their bodies nestled neatly side by side. “You look good in my jacket. You look good all the time, kid.” 

“Really?” Finn snorts. It seems absurd that the best pilot in the resistance, Poe Dameron with his natural, easy confidence and ever tousled hair and heart-thieving smile, thinks _he_ looks good all the time. It seems _impossible._ He blinks, smiling stupidly as his eyes get heavy. “ _You_ look good all of the time. If you want to talk about looking good,” Finn slurs. “You’re fucking perfect.”

“I want to talk about a lot of things, tomorrow,” Poe says. “But now I want to sleep, right here, just like this,” he says, flexing his arm against Finn’s chest, bringing him closer. “We’ve got a lot of snow and a rendezvous to worry about tomorrow.” 

So strange, so new, to nod off against someone like this, beneath the warm, heavy weight of another human’s arm. Finn is not used to holding things which aren’t blasters, but he thinks he could learn, with practice. He supposes for now, he’s content to be held, instead. _Surrender_ , he thinks as he drifts off, twitching against Poe’s chest. _Is not the same thing as running away._


End file.
